This is the poem Derek Walcott wrote for Obama. Read it out loud twice. I dare you. I couldn’t get through it the second time. Too weepy. This is a beautiful, beautiful piece.

Forty Acres

Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving â€” a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls, an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed, parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked cotton forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens that the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch, is a tense court of bespectacled owls and, on the field’s receding rim â€” a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him. The small plough continues on this lined page beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado’s black vengeance, and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins, heart, muscles, tendons, till the land lies open like a flag as dawn’s sure light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower.